Bound Foot

Liu Hung, artist

1948–2021

Bound Foot, 1992

Where object was made: United States

Material/technique: photolithograph

Dimensions:
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 422 x 617 mm
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 573 x 762 mm
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 16 5/8 x 24 5/16 in
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 22 9/16 x 30 in
Mat Dimensions (Height x Width): 24 x 32 in

Credit line: Museum purchase: Letha Churchill Walker Memorial Art Fund

Accession number: 1993.0301

Not on display

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Images

Label texts

Exhibition Label:
“Embodiment,” Nov-2005, Kate Meyer
Hung Liu’s art addresses the exploitation of women in China, a concern that is illustrated here in her appropriation of an early-twentieth-century photograph of a woman exposing her bound feet with a line drawing of a female figure without arms or legs. Although the practice of foot binding was banned in 1911, by framing the early photograph and the contemporary drawing together, Liu creates a metaphor that suggests the continued physical and inevitable mental constraints placed on Chinese women in contemporary society.

Exhibition Label:
"Modernisms: Late/Post," Mar-1997, Deborah J. Wilk
Since immigrating to the United States in 1984, Liu has been interested in what she calls the "cultural collisions" between East and West, especially in the representations of women. In Bound Foot, Liu reproduces a photograph of a turn-of-the-century Chinese prostitute next to a seventeenth-century Chinese medical illustration.
According to Liu, male Western photographers "changed Chinese photography" when they "brought cameras to China, took pictures of Chinese and brought them back to the United States. The Chinese male photographers internalized this Western male gaze, and turned their cameras on their own women, particularly these young prostitutes for sale.